![]() ![]() This is not a history or a literature class our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. You’ll be asking to read four books: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War and Peter Dale Scott’s long poem, Coming to Jakarta. What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between writers and what they may write? In this class, we’ll discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Pablo Neruda, Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, 1948 Are you going to ask where I am? I’ll tell you-giving only details useful to the State. ![]()
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